ARTIST IN FOCUS : SYLVAIN GEORGE
Sylvain George (1968, Vaulx-en-Velin, France) studied philosophy and
worked as a social worker until he turned to filmmaking in 2004. His
work, influenced greatly by the thinking of Walter Benjamin, combines
militant commitment with formal experiment. "The idea", he says, "is to
make films that take a stand and assert a political position, and at the
same time not to separate content from form; to be formally demanding
and to manage to define an own view and grammar as a filmmaker." Far
away from any form of didacticism or dogmatism, his films – from short
"contrefeux" filmed with a mobile phone to elaborate feature-length
documentaries – depict and allegorise the struggles of the "nouveaux
damnés", trapped between the rule and the exception: the stateless, the
clandestine, the precarious. His most recent work, the impressive Qu'ils
reposent en révolte (des figures de guerre), gives an account of the
living conditions of migrants in Calais over a period of three years
(2007-2010). "Politically speaking, it is about standing up, contesting
these grey zones, these spaces or cracks like Calais standing somewhere
between the exception and the rule, beyond the scope of law, where law
is suspended, where individuals are deprived, stripped off their most
fundamental rights. And that while creating, through some dialectic
reversal, the 'true' exceptional states. Space-time continuums where
beings and things are fully restored to what they were, are, will be,
could be or could have been". Rebellion and emancipation are at the
heart of George's films, which find true politics in the gestures, cries
and bodies of those who are within the dominant socio-economical order
considered as "surplus": Included, but not belonging. 13:00 SHORT FILMS
BY SYLVAIN GEORGE N'entre pas sans violence FR, 2007, video, b/w, French
spoken, English subs, 20' No Border FR, 2007, Super 8 to video, b/w,
French spoken, English subs, 23' Ils nous tueront tous… FR, 2009, video,
b/w, French spoken, English subs, 11' 14:30 LES JOURS DE COLERE compiled
by Sylvain George Afrique 50 René Vautier, FR, 1950, 16mm to video, b/w,
French spoken, English subs, 17' A caça Manoel de Oliveira, PT, 1964,
16mm, colour, Portugese spoken, French subs, 21' Prigionieri della
guerra Angela Ricci-Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian, IT, 2004, colour & b/w,
sound, 71' 16:45 L'IMPOSSIBLE L'Impossible - Pages arrachées FR, 2009,
Super 8, DV, 17mm to video, b/w & colour, sound, French spoken, English
subs, 135'

ARTIST IN FOCUS : ROBERT FENZ
Robert Fenz (1969, Ann Arbor, Michigan) is one of the most singular and
committed filmmakers breathing new life to avant-garde film traditions
today. Fenz's films, mostly shot in black and white 16mm, have a rare
energy and restless beauty that recalls both the jazz-inspired imagery
of New York School photographers such as Roy DeCarava, but also the
landscape films of one of Fenz's former teachers, Peter Hutton, and the
documentary work of Johan van der Keuken and Chantal Akerman, some of
whose recent film works have actually been shot by Fenz himself. His
films are personal and poetic portraits of people and places he
encountered during his many travels in countries such as in Cuba,
Mexico, Brazil and India. "Though they can be viewed as non-fiction
works, objectivity is not one of their pretences. Images not words are
central and the primary means by which their ideas are articulated. In
each case, meaning is determined by three factors, 'intention,
circumstance and chance' ingredients filmmaker Robert Gardner describes
as central to the making of a non-fiction film." Fenz's attitude towards
filmmaking has also been greatly influenced by jazz improvisation,
especially by the work of trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, under whom he
studied. "Studying music with Leo reinforced my belief that I needed to
go into the world with an idea – do research on a subject and arrive at
a place where I would be prepared to adapt and change the film
completely, in the moment". The most celebrated result of this approach
is Meditations on Revolution, a series of five films made over seven
years (1997-2003), exploring the basic theme of revolution in its purest
qualities: the revolution inscribed in rural and urban spaces, steeped
in hollowed and smiling faces, dancing on the rhythms of a world in
constant transition. Robert Fenz has just completed one new film which
will have its European premiere at the festival: The Sole of the Foot.
20:30 ROBERT FENZ SELECTION PART 1 Meditations on Revolution, Part V:
Foreign City Robert Fenz, US, 2003, 16mm, b/w, sound, 32' Perfect Film
Ken Jacobs, US, 1986, 16mm, b/w, English spoken, 22' Vakantie van de
Filmer (Filmmakers Holiday) Johan Van der Keuken, NL, 1974, 16mm,
colour, Dutch spoken, English subs, 38' 22:30 ROBERT FENZ SELECTION PART
2 Trop tôt, trop tard (Too Early, Too Late) Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle
Huillet, FR, 1981, 16mm, colour, French spoken, English subs, 105'
++++++EXTRA++++++Robert Fenz & Wadada Leo Smith, Fri 01.04.2011, VOORUIT
/// Robert Fenz and Sylvain George will give a masterclass together on
Friday 01.04.2011, 10:00 at KASK Cinema.

JAPAN!
Featuring works by: Peter Buntaine, Takahiko Iimura, Yasue Maetake,
Jonas Mekas, Jeremy Slater, Stom Sogo, & Leslie Thornton. / / / / / / /
Admission $8 – Half will be donated to the American Red Cross and
earmarked for relief efforts in Japan........................... With
Japan on everyone's mind, we present an evening of short videos dealing
with the beauty and horror of what is modern Japan. The diverse program
features experimental works by Japanese artists Stom Sogo, Yasue
Maetake, & Takahiko Iimura; works of love shot in Japan by New York
artists Jonas Mekas, Jeremy Slater, and Peter Buntaine who have spent
time there, and Leslie Thorton's exploration of the aftermath of
man-made destructions and terror, including
Hiroshima..............................For more info, call 347.925.1433
or email info[at]microscopegallery[dot]com

ERIKA BECKMAN: THE 16MM FILMS
YOU THE BETTER (1983, 35 minutes, 16mm) "[A] film based on games of
chance, and as games such as roulette, or craps go, this one is closed –
meaning that the player cannot really affect the outcome. A team of
uniformed players, led by the artist Ashley Bickerton, performs the
mechanics of a game servicing an off-camera betting entity, the 'House'.
Although the game keeps changing and players are swapped out, one thing
remains the same, the 'House' is hidden and controls the bets, the
'chance' of winning is nil. The game, in fact, is not between the
players, but rather between the 'House', and the 'Bettor'." –E.B.
CINDERELLA (1986, 30 minutes, 16mm) "[O]wes as much to pinball as to
Perrault. Although no less fraught with psychosexual tension than Walt
Disney's version, Beckman drops the fairytale's sibling rivalry and
Oedipal underpinnings, reworking the heroine's situation as an allegory
of female socialization. Vintage Beckman, CINDERELLA exhibits the
filmmaker's characteristic use of ambiguous interior space, stutter-stop
development, incantatory songs, and dreamlike condensation." –J.
Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE HIATUS (1999, 20 minutes, 16mm-to-video) "An
experimental narrative film about a young woman who plays HIATUS, an
on-line interactive 'identity' game. Propelled through action by her
Go-Go cowgirl construct Wanda, and powered by a computer corset that
stores her programs in a garden interface, Maid meets Wang, a powerful
take-over artist. She must learn how to use the power of her 'organic
memory' to block his expansion and preserve her freedom." –E.B. SWITCH
CENTER (2003, 12 minutes, 16mm) "I chose an abandoned water purification
plant on the outskirts of Budapest as the setting for Switch Center. In
conceiving of this film, I was inspired by Léger's early avant-garde
picture BALLET MÉCANIQUE. In my film, the structure itself comes to life
through the manipulations of the employees who work inside it. I wanted
to make a tribute to the kind of futuristic pragmatism expressed by
these buildings that are now being razed to allow space for shopping
malls and corporate offices." –E.B. Total running time: ca. 100 minutes.

SAT. 4/2: CLANDESTINE + BANKSY + PRANKS +
The joke is that it's actually the day after, but we're carrying the
prankster spirit of April Fool's to our gallery tonight. But seriously,
we're celebrating two book launches: David Cox' Sign Wars and Brett
Kashmere's Incite, both on counter-archival practices. Headlining is
Gideon C. Kennedy and Marcus Rosentrater's Clandestine, a wholly
appropriated concoction that narrates the fascinating tale of the Conet
shortwave-radio broadcasts. These "Numbers Stations" anachronistically
use human voices to encrypt classified intelligence in haunting,
repeated cadences of simple numerals. ALSO Banksy in B-Movie, David
(Wax) Blair's Telepathic Cinema of Manchuria, and Mark Amerika's
Spectacle Remix. Come early to browse the books at our
Negativland-enriched reception with toast and jam, Yes Men clips, and
free TV Sheriff DVDs!

ARTIST IN FOCUS : ROBERT BEAVERS
Robert Beavers (1949, Brookline, Massachusetts) is one of the most
influential avant-garde filmmakers of the second half of the 20th
century. Although born and raised in the United States, he has been
living and making films in Europe since 1967. His 16mm films, at the
same time lyrical and rigorous, sensuous and complex, are inhabited by
the landscapes, the architecture and the cultural traditions of the
Mediterranean and Alpine cities and countryside where they are filmed,
and yet reveal deeper personal and aesthetic themes. As he acknowledges
himself, he strives "for the projected film image to have the same force
of awakening sight as any other great image." He regards filming as part
of a complex procedure, which begins in the eyes of the filmmaker and is
shaped by his gestures in relation to the camera. Beavers's attention to
the physicality of the film medium is evident also in the editing, a
fully manual process that leads to a unique form of phrasing. Harry
Tomicek calls it a form of "cinematic breathing": "an exchange of speech
and silence, emergence and concealment. Robert Beavers might be the only
filmmaker in the world whose works announce the mystery of this
process." Until the late 1990s his films were very rarely shown, but
recent retrospectives at the Tate Modern London, the Whitney Museum in
New York, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley and the
Austrian Film Museum in Vienna have finally brought to his work the
attention it deserves. Courtisane and Cinematek will join forces to
present his oeuvre in Ghent and Brussels, a city Beavers has a strong
attachment to but where his work hasn't been screened in several
decades. Brussels was not only the first European city where he settled
together with his partner filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos (1928-1992)
after leaving the United States but also where his film culture and
cinephilia developed, thanks to Jacques Ledoux, the then curator of the
Royal Belgian Film Archive. Ledoux also encouraged Beavers to continue
making films, and is one of the protagonists of Plan of Brussels (1968).
From his Early Monthly Segments to his most recent work The Suppliant
(2010), this selective retrospective in Brussels and Ghent covers more
than 40 years of work and represents for Beavers an occasion to return
to the scene of his beginnings as a filmmaker, the Brussels
Cinémathèque. On the last day of the festival, April 3, Robert Beavers
will present a selection of films of his own as well as by other
filmmakers in Ghent. The following week, four more screening programmes
will follow in Cinematek, the film theatre of the Belgian Royal Film
Archive. 15:00 ROBERT BEAVERS FILMS PART 1 Ruskin 1975/1997, 35mm, b/w &
colour, sound, 45' Filmed in Italy (Venice), Switzerland (the Grisons)
and England (London) The Suppliant 2010, 16mm, colour, sound, 5' Filmed
in USA (New York) Pitcher of Colored Light 2007, 16mm, colour, sound,
23' Filmed in USA (Falmouth, Massachusetts) 16:45 CARTE BLANCHE TO
ROBERT BEAVERS Bagatelle for Willard Maas Marie Menken, US, 1958/1961,
16mm, colour, silent, 5'30" India Ute Aurand, DE, 2005, 16mm, colour,
sound, 57' ++++++PROGRAMMES 2,3,4 and 5 at the Brussels CINEMATEK
between April 5th and April 9th++++++

GAINING CONSCIOUSNESS: AN EVENING WITH GARY KIBBINS
Los Angeles premieres! Gary Kibbins in person! Expanding his ongoing
work with new and found footage and his remarkable, dry, and witty
texts, Kibbins's new films raise profound questions about the languages
used to construct the world, while at the same time having that rare
quality of being uniquely, laugh-out-loud funny. Films to be screened
include: The Unlucky Sailor (9 Unread Chapters of Finnegans Wake)
(2010), 7 Questions About Bicycles (2009), and How to Lose Consciousness
(2008).

ESSENTIAL CINEMA: SS:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED
by Paul Sharits 1968-70, 41 minutes, 16mm Preserved by Anthology Film
Archives with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation. "A
conceptual lap dissolve from 'water currents' to 'film strip
currents'/Dedicated to my son Christopher." –P.S. "Yes, S:S:S:S:S:S is
beautiful. The successive scratchings of the stream-image film is very
powerful vandalism. The film is a very complete organism with all the
possible levels really recognized." –Michael Snow

ESSENTIAL CINEMA: THE FLOWER THIEF
SENSELESS 1962, 28 minutes, 16mm. "Consisting of a poetic stream of
razor-sharp images, the overt content of SENSELESS portrays ecstatic
travelers going to pot over the fantasies and pleasures of a trip to
Mexico.... Highly effective cutting subtly interweaves the contrapuntal
development of themes of love and hate, peace and violence, beauty and
destruction." –David Brooks THE FLOWER THIEF 1960, 59 minutes, 16mm,
b&w. Starring Taylor Mead. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with
support from the National Film Preservation Foundation. "In the old
Hollywood movie days movie studios would keep a man on the set who, when
all other sources of ideas failed (writers, directors), was called upon
to 'cook up' something for filming. He was called The Wild Man. THE
FLOWER THIEF has been put together in memory of all dead wild men who
died unnoticed in the field of stunt." –R.R.

THE QUEEN OF SHEBA MEETS THE ATOM MAN
by Ron Rice 1963/82, 109 minutes, 16mm "The film describes, poetically,
a way of living. The film is a protest which is violent, childish, and
sincere – a protest against an industrial world based on the cycle of
production and consumption." –Alberto Moravia, L'ESPRESSO

21 PROJECTS: SPARSE GARDENS BY RICK BAHTO
Sparse Gardens by Rick Bahto consists of a set of field recordings on
tape lasting approximately 57 minutes. During the hour 36 Kodachrome
slides, made in the same locations as the field recordings, will be
projected. Two types of gardened spaces common in Phoenix, Arizona will
be visually and sonically compared: the fussily landscaped strips and
islands of parking lots and driveways, as well as vacant lots, bulldozed
clear of buildings or natural desert, that have been re-inhabited by
weeds or rogue/remnant landscaping plants. 21 Projects x 21 days x 21
Hours is a community based social experiment. Drawing on the talents,
interests, and knowledge of the community, 21 Projects was created with
the intention of providing a platform for people to exchange resources,
ideas, experiences, and fun in a dynamic, approachable gallery
environment.

BETZY BROMBERG’S VOLUPTUOUS SLEEP SERIES
Betzy Bromberg returns to REDCAT with Voluptuous Sleep Series (2011),
her first film in five years and a mesmerizing two-part 16mm meditation
on the nuances of light, sound and feeling evoked through the poetic
artifices of cinema. Bromberg's close-up lens becomes a tool of infinite
discovery that reveals as much about our bodily sensations as it does
the natural world. Paired with two intricately composed soundtracks
created in collaboration with Dane A. Davis, Zack Settel, Jean-Pierre
Bedoyan, Pam Aronoff, James Rees and Robert Allaire, Voluptuous Sleep is
an emotional tour de force that serves as a rapturous antidote to the
fragmentation of modern life and a new experience of cinematic time and
memory. An active filmmaker since 1976, Bromberg has presented work at
the Museum of Modern Art, Harvard Film Archives, Anthology Film
Archives, London's National FilmTheatre and the Centre Pompidou, as well
as numerous international film festivals. In person: Betzy Bromberg

----------------------
TUESDAY, APRIL 5, 2011
----------------------

4/5
Amherst, MA: The Hampshire College Film Society/ "NecroCinema"
7pm, Hampshire College Film and Photo Building

MATT NEWMAN LONG SCREENING AND ARTIST'S TALK
************************************************************************
**************** Film/Video Artist Mathew Newman Long presents two of
his films, "Wayne" and "What We Move is Dead".

MULHOLLAND DRIVE
Mulholland Drive (2001, 147 min) by DAVID LYNCH "I,m still trying to
decide if this piece of hocus-pocus … is David Lynch's best feature
between Eraserhead and Inland Empire. In any case, it's immensely more
likable than his other stabs at neonoir…, perhaps because it likes its
characters and avoids sentimentalizing or sneering at them…. Originally
conceived and rejected as a TV pilot, then expanded after some French
producers stepped in, it has the benefit of Lynch's own observations
about Hollywood, which were fresher at this point than his puritanical
notations on small towns in the American heartland. The best-known
actors (Ann Miller, Robert Forster, Dan Hedaya) wound up relatively
marginalized, while the [then]lesser-known talents (in particular the
remarkable Naomi Watts and the glamorous Laura Elena Harring) were
invited to take over the movie (and have a field day doing so). The plot
slides along agreeably as a tantalizing mystery before becoming almost
completely inexplicable, though no less thrilling, in the closing
stretches—but that's what Lynch is famous for."- Jonathan Rosenbaum -
Chicago Reader

4/5
San Francisco, California: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
http://www.sfmoma.org
noon, 151 Third Street

SFMOMA PRESENTS EVENTS IN THE ENVIRONMENT
Free Tuesday program introuced by Tanya Zimbardo, assistant curator of
media arts, SFMOMA. Zimbardo introduces a range of video works and
recorded performances primarily from the 1970s that engage in various
ways with the natural or urban environment. The conceptual experiments
in the first part of the program reflect on perception and
disorientation; in the second part, artists move against the backdrop of
New York's Lower East Side or intervene in public locations in San
Francisco. Artists include Lawrence Weiner, Joan Jonas, Anthony McCall,
and Jill Scott, among others. Visit sfmoma.org for program details.

ZHU WEN: THOMAS MAO (XIAO DONGXI)
Los Angeles premiere | 2010, 80 min., DigiBeta One of the most original
voices of post-socialist China, novelist/filmmaker Zhu Wen has crafted,
for his third feature, a droll, surreal and ironic tale in which East
meets West… or does it? Thomas is a painter trekking through the
grasslands of Inner Mongolia, and Mao the scruffy "innkeeper" who lodges
him. Gradually, what appears to be "reality" shifts. Who is the
butterfly, who is the philosopher? Preceded by a new animated short by
Sun Xun: 21G (2010, 27 min., DVD). As part of the screening series
Disorder and Unexpected Pleasures: Tales from the New Chinese Cinema
running from April 6th- April 9th. Jack H. Skirball Series $9 [students
$7, CalArts $5]

BOTBORG!
Live performance! Joe Musgrove and Scott Sinclair in person! As Botborg,
Berlin/Brisbane-based artists and musicians Scott Sinclair and Joe
Musgrove fuse and rewire raw electronic signals to create intensely
visceral experiences of sound-color synaesthesia. Using a complex array
of custom electronics, audio and video mixers, cameras and screens, the
duo blends sound and vision into a self-perpetuating web of
interdependent color and rhythm, generated (in real time) entirely by
device feedback. In their first US duo performance, Musgrove and
Sinclair will present a new, improvisatory performance, incorporating
the unique characteristics of the Film Center's theater into their
system. Botborg's work has screened around the globe and they have
performed throughout Europe and Australia, including at Ars Electronica
in Linz, Austria and the Spectropia Festival in Riga, Latvia.
Co-presented by the experimental music series Lampo. www.lampo.org.
2011, Joe Musgrove/Scott Sinclair, Australia/Germany, multiple formats,
ca. 60 mins plus discussion.

LI HONGQI: WINTER VACATION (HANJIA)
Los Angeles premiere | 2010, 91 min., HDCAM Slackers in Inner Mongolia
meet the poetry of the absurd. In a dreary little northern town, kids
have nothing to do… while the adults are wily or apathetic. For his
third feature, poet/filmmaker Li Hongqi effortlessly leads the viewer
through a series of breathtaking tableaux in which tension accumulates
and then releases in unexpected, and often wickedly funny, ways. As part
of the screening series Disorder and Unexpected Pleasures: Tales from
the New Chinese Cinema running April 6th- 9th.Jack H. Skirball Series $9
[students $7, CalArts $5]

WALL OF MEMORIES
by Vlada Petric 2011, 150 minutes, video SPECIAL SCREENING! Made in
collaboration with Anthony Flackett. As a professor of film history and
theory at Harvard University for more than 25 years (1972-1997) and the
founding curator of the Harvard Film Archive, Vlada Petric is a
crucially important figure in American film culture. During his years at
Harvard, he amassed a veritable museum's worth of photographs,
reproductions, frame enlargements, photograms, clippings, and miniature
souvenirs, all of which he 'exhibited' on the wall above his desk. Prior
to his retirement, Prof. Petric's assistants shot the entire wall with a
digital camera. And so began the creation of his expansive,
years-in-the-making, perpetual work-in-progress THE WALL OF MEMORIES.
Conceived on the collage principle, the piece utilizes this digital
footage as a kind of 'archival material'. From over 800 items Petric
selected about 50, concocting sequences dedicated to his favorite film
directors, as well as to his favorite painters, photographers, and
designers, and to his own past (a visit to his birth place in Bosnia,
his return to Harvard's Carpenter Center, and his recollection of his
studies in Moscow). THE WALL OF MEMORIES is at once a reflection on
Petric's theory of film aesthetics and a nostalgic examination of a life
devoted to film.

ACTIVATING THE MEDIUM
Since 1998, 23five Incorporated has produced the annual Activating The
Medium festival-an internationally recognized showcase for the most
innovative and visionary practitioners of sound art. This year's
festival explored the use of radio through composition and new media
presentation, with one night held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art. This evening will feature performances by Richard Garet and Jim
Haynes & Allison Holt.

THE FREE SCREEN: RADICAL LIGHT: STORIES UNTOLD
Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area,
1945–2000 In conjunction with the publication of the Pacific Film
Archive's first book, Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the
San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, BAM/PFA is presenting a touring
series exploring the themes, movements and rich historical chronology of
alternative film and video in the Bay Area. Following last season's
"Landscape as Expression" programme, The Free Screen and the Images
Festival pair up for a second night of Radical Light. Stories Untold The
satiric, sensual and striking stories in this programme represent some
of the ways in which the tale can commingle with the telling to produce
oddly original offspring. James Broughton's allegorical romp features
the eponymous enchanted "Bed" as a staging area for life's cycles. Curt
McDowell is not so enchanted with his return home in A Visit to Indiana.
Home movies from the heartland play off his droll disappointment. Ever
pent-up, George Kuchar's prodigiously purple A Reason to Live pits
meteorological excess against the swelling desires of a man in heat and
his numerous love objects. The pressure to perform is at the base of Max
Almy's Deadline, a concise yet effects-laden lamentation. Easy Living
never is in Chip Lord's horrifically serene look at suburbia, using
miniature toys to create a landscape of false tranquility. Scott Stark's
wryly postured I'll Walk with God deploys airline emergency information
cards to show how stewardesses have unwittingly ascended to a higher
spiritual plane. Anne McGuire has the last word with All Smiles and
Sadness, an unfolding soap opera in which its black-and-white characters
jabber on in airy cliche until George Kuchar arrives to superheat the
atmosphere. —Steve Seid Steve Seid is co-curator of Radical Light:
Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Bed dir.
James Broughton | USA 1968 | 19 min. | 16mm A Visit to Indiana dir. Curt
McDowell | USA 1970 | 10 min. | 16mm A Reason to Live dir. George Kuchar
| USA 1976 | 26 min. | 16mm Deadline dir. Max Almy | USA 1981 | 5 min. |
video Easy Living dirs. Chip Lord & Mickey McGowan | USA 1984 | 19 min.
| mini-DV I'll Walk with God dir. Scott Stark | USA 1994 | 8 min. | 16mm
All Smiles and Sadness dir. Anne McGuire | USA 1999 | 8 min. | mini-DV
Co-presented with Images Festival www.imagesfestival.com Radical Light:
Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area Book, Film, and
Video Tour was curated by Kathy Geritz and Steve Seid, Film and Video
Curators at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and
Pacific Film Archive, and Steve Anker, Dean of the School of Film/Video
at California Institute of the Arts. The tour is made possible in part
by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for
the Visual Arts and the William H. Donner Foundation.

SMOKE AND MIRRORS! FEAT. LINE DESCRIBING A CONE BY ANTHONY MCCALL AND
WORK BY CAROLINE KOEBEL AND SCOTT STARK
Join us for an evening of flowing layers and reflected rays! We will be
rocking out our fog machine to screen Anthony McCall's seminal Line
Describing a Cone , described as "the most brilliant case of an
observation on the essentially sculptural quality of every cinematic
situation." (P. Adams Sitney.) Our smoky program will also feature work
by Caroline Koebel (the instructor of our upcoming avant-garde film
class) and Scott Stark!

LIU JIAYIN: OXHIDE II (NIUPI II)
Los Angeles premiere | 2009, 133 min., DigiBeta In 2004, at 23, Liu
Jiayin stunned the world by shooting Oxhide in Cinemascope in her
parents' 50-square-meter apartment. She is back at REDCAT with an even
bolder "sequel." More tightly constructed—nine shots that go around a
kitchen/workshop/dining table in 45-degree increments, performing a
complete 180-degree match—Oxhide II is also dryly humorous, intelligent
and insightful, deconstructing the dynamics of a family in crisis. As
part of the screening series Disorder and Unexpected Pleasures: Tales
from the New Chinese Cinema running April 6th- 9th.Jack H. Skirball
Series $9 [students $7, CalArts $5]

HAO JIE: SINGLE MAN (GUANGYUN)
U.S. premiere | 2010, 95 min., HDCAM "This is a strange and delightful
thing from China: a sex comedy, bawdy and a little raunchy, about four
elderly farmers… all non-professional actors playing fictionalized
versions of themselves. New director Hao Jie, with a bit of Boccaccio
and a dollop of Rabelais, reveals a side of rural China you've probably
never seen before… Chinese indie cinema at its most wryly entertaining."
–Vancouver International Film Festival. As part of the screening series
Disorder and Unexpected Pleasures: Tales from the New Chinese Cinema
running April 6th-9th.Jack H. Skirball Series $9 [students $7, CalArts
$5]

HUANG WEIKAI: DISORDER (XIAN ZAI SHI GUO QU DE WEI LAI)
Los Angeles premiere | 2009, 58 min., DVCAM A splendid, original
experiment on how to translate urban texture on the screen. Huang Weikai
collected more than 1,000 hours of footage shot by amateurs and
journalists in the streets of Guangzhou. He then selected 20-odd
incidents, reworked the images into quasi-surreal grainy black-and-white
and montaged them to create a kaleidoscopic view of the great southern
metropolis, in all her vibrant, loud and mean chaos. As part of the
screening series Disorder and Unexpected Pleasures: Tales from the New
Chinese Cinema running April 6th-9th.Jack H. Skirball Series $9
[students $7, CalArts $5]

JIA ZHANGKE: I WISH I KNEW (HAI SHANG CHUAN QI)
Los Angeles premiere | 2010, 138 min., HDCAM China's most significant
filmmaker of the decade has done it again, with another alluring hybrid
of documentary and fiction. Here Jia weaves a dense texture between
amorously shot footage of contemporary Shanghai and the films the city
created or inspired. Peeking through the gaps of an architecture menaced
by permanent urban renewal, he finds the traces of a romantic or brutal
past, and echoes the voices of survivors or those who went into exile.
As part of the screening series Disorder and Unexpected Pleasures: Tales
from the New Chinese Cinema running April 6th-9th.Jack H. Skirball
Series $9 [students $7, CalArts $5]

ESSENTIAL CINEMA: FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS
by Roberto Rossellini In Italian with English subtitles, 1949, 85
minutes, 35mm Share + Film Notes Francesco (St. Francis of Assisi) comes
back to Santa Maria degli Angeli from Rome, journeying with his friars
through the rain. When they are driven out of a hut, he begs the
brothers' forgiveness for abusing their obedience. While the monks are
finishing the chapel, Brother Ginepro arrives naked again and confesses
that the previous night he was tempted by the Devil. Later, he cuts the
foot off a pig to feed a sick brother. That evening, Francesco meets a
leper and kisses him. Brother Ginepro receives Francesco's permission to
preach and arrives at the camp of Nicolaio, the tyrant of Viterbo, whose
cruelty he overcomes with his perfect humility. Francesco teaches
Brother Leone that bearing injuries and blows is an example of perfect
joy. Francesco sends his brothers out to preach far and wide.

UNDERGROUND USA
by Eric Mitchell 1980, 85 minutes, 16mm-to-video FILMMAKER IN PERSON! In
conjunction with the forthcoming release of Céline Danhier's BLANK CITY,
a feature-length documentary on the No Wave movement that defined
underground culture in NYC in the 70s & 80s, sweeping through the worlds
of filmmaking, music, art, and writing, we devote a weekend to two of
the seminal works of No Wave cinema: Eric Mitchell's UNDERGROUND U.S.A.
and its even more uncompromising and provocative predecessor, KIDNAPPED.
Special thanks to Eric Mitchell. "A satire of contemporary New York
'scenemaking' in the form of an update of SUNSET BLVD., UNDERGROUND
U.S.A. is both a personal triumph for its creator, actor-director Eric
Mitchell, and a further indication of the importance of New York's New
Wave film movement. … "As played by Patti Astor, Vicky is clearly meant
to represent Edie Sedgwick, the superstar of Warhol's legendary
cinematic psychodramas. Like Norma Desmond, she lives with her butler
(Rene Ricard as an effete Erich von Stroheim) in high style, half-mad
and lost in drug-induced dreams of a comeback. But instead of William
Holden's disillusioned writer-turned-gigolo, a completely spent and
soulless Joe Dallesandro-styled hustler, played by Mitchell himself, is
offered. … "There's a rich, multi-layered texture at work here.
Characters exist less for themselves than as iconographical anchoring
devices – points of reference in a hall of mirrors crossing space and
time. The time is now, but it is also the then of the '60s and the '50s
and (remembered) '20s of the Billy Wilder melodrama. As these spent
sophisticates move through Mitchell's carefully designed decor trapped
in their narcissistic fantasies, going through the motions of rituals
that have lost all meaning for them, we may giggle but at the same time
be touched by their lives of noisy desperation." –David Ehrenstein, BOMB

KIDNAPPED
by Eric Mitchell 1978, 60 minutes, Super-8mm-to-video FILMMAKER IN
PERSON! In conjunction with the forthcoming release of Céline Danhier's
BLANK CITY, a feature-length documentary on the No Wave movement that
defined underground culture in NYC in the 70s & 80s, sweeping through
the worlds of filmmaking, music, art, and writing, we devote a weekend
to two of the seminal works of No Wave cinema: Eric Mitchell's
UNDERGROUND U.S.A. and its even more uncompromising and provocative
predecessor, KIDNAPPED. Special thanks to Eric Mitchell. "KIDNAPPED – 15
raw rolls of Super-8 spliced together for video projection – showcases
the 'no wave' upper-crust. … [A] number of KIDNAPPED's principles seem
wrested from the [Amos Poe film THE FOREIGNER], including Patti Astor, a
buxom blonde in crewcut and cocktail dress, and Anya Phillips, a
wise-cracking Eurasian with a starlet's radar for keeping in frame. Her
intuition is truly impressive in KIDNAPPED: for most of its 60 minutes
the camera pans around a barren Avenue B tub-in-kit[chen] remorselessly
chopping off torsos at the neck. … "KIDNAPPED seems almost an homage to
VINYL – one of the few vintage Warhols that's screened these days – but
Mitchell's random compositions, on-screen direction, and impoverished
location shake the mothballs off the Factory aesthetic. It's actually
witty when he stages a violently autistic dance number to Devo's
'Satisfaction'…." –J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE Preceded by: MASS HOMICIDE
(1977, 7 minutes, video)

SAT. 4/9: ALL 16MM, ALL RETRO MUSIC-ON-FILM PARTY!
Gleefully gleaned from an extremely generous bequest from archivist
extraordinaire Rick Prelinger, this eye-popping program of 16mm musical
anomalies mostly features "Soundies," performances on film produced for
visual jukeboxes of the '40s and '50s. More than just kitsch, these oft
transcendent artifacts reveal a post-war pop-cultural world of naive
charm and irrepressible surrealist imagination. Among this jazz/R&B/pop
bonanza are: Steve Lawrence's Mine and Mine Alone; Vanita Symthe's Low,
Shorty, and Squatty; Buddy Clark's Moonlight Cocktail; Mousie Powell's
Crazy Things; Ving Merlin's Enchanted Violins; a ten-year-old Michael
Jackson (with the other four); and a man-killing Judo femme fatale! Oh,
and did we mention free beer at the bar?

MORGAN FISHER PRESENTS 'UNDER CAPRICORN'
Under Capricorn April 10 at 3pm It is well known that some of
Hitchcock's films take place all but entirely in a single confined
space: Rope, Rear Window, Lifeboat. By working within this self-imposed
limit Hitchcock showed that shifts from one space to another, all too
easy in film and on which almost all narrative films depend, are hardly
a necessity. Another limit in film is a material one, the length of a
roll of film. There can be no shot longer than eleven minutes. It is
clear that the staging of many of the scenes in Under Capricorn was
conceived of in relation to this limit, in fact working backwards from
it. The action in these scenes—the dialogue and how it is delivered, the
movements of the actors, the rhythms they all create—was composed to
accord with a length of time close to the maximum that a roll of film
allowed. This procedure inverts the way scenes in almost all films are
shot, where they are built up piece by piece from the elements of
classical decoupage—the establishing shot, two-shot, close-ups—to move
the story forward without regard for how long each shots lasts. In a
scene shot in a continuous take, everything necessary has to happen but
nothing beyond. And the execution of the scene is as exacting as its
composition. Everything must happen perfectly: how the actors deliver
their lines, their expressions, their gestures, how and where they move,
how the camera moves. One mistake in the least detail, and there is no
alternative but to start over again. You can't cut around mistakes, you
can't get rid of lines you don't need or add lines that you do, you
can't go back and shoot pick-ups. The longer the take and the more
complicated the movements of the actors and the movements of the camera,
the more opportunities for things to go wrong. Not only does everything
has to happen perfectly, it has to happen without apparent effort, when
in fact the shot is the result of a large number of people making
extraordinary efforts, the work of each exactly coordinated with the
work of everyone else. For me the sustained perfection of the long takes
in Under Capricorn inspires awe. - Morgan Fisher Directed by Alfred
Hitchcock. With Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotton, Michael Wilding. USA
1949, 35mm, color, 117 min.

TREATING (ZHI LIAO)
US premiere! "The film was triggered by my desire to explore the deep
emotions caused by my mother's death in 2007. The focus shifted as was I
was sorting through the 12 years of footage I had collected, seeing
subtleties I had previously overlooked, or reliving past experiences…
Then I realized this film is not just about remembering my mother—it's
also an experiment to bring her back to life." - Wu Wenguang (2010, 80
min. DVD, in Mandarin with English subtitles). Preceded by: Sun Xun:
Beyond-ism (Zhuyi zhiwai) (Animation, 2010, 8.8 min., DVD).